This book is a collection of secondary essays on America's most important philosophic thinkers—statesmen, judges, writers, educators, and activists—from the colonial period to the present. Each essay is a comprehensive introduction to the thought of a noted American on the fundamental meaning of the American regime.

Lewisian theism is the view that both traditional theism and Lewis’s modal realism are true. On Lewisian theism, God must exist in worlds in one of the following ways: God can be said to have a counterpart in each world; God can be said to exist in each world in the way that a universal can be said to exist in worlds, i.e. through transworld identity; God can be said to be a scattered individual, with a part of God existing (...) in each world; and, God can be said to exist in each world, through His existing from the standpoint of each world. In the literature, – have been rejected as viable options. I grant that and are not viable. However, I believe that and have been too hastily rejected. Herein, I develop ways to respond to objections to and, and conclude that is a viable option for Lewisian theists. (shrink)

On Anselmian theism, God is, amongst other things, a necessary being. On genuine modal realism, possible worlds are maximal mereological sums of spatiotemporally connected individuals. I argue in this paper that AT and GMR are either incompatible or their conjunction leads to—amongst other things—modal collapse. Specifically, I argue: regardless of whether God is concrete or abstract, His necessary existence either is inconsistent with AT-GMR or it leads to, amongst other things, modal collapse for AT-GMR. I conclude the paper by contending (...) that, if I am correct, the ATist will have an argument against the truth of GMR, and the GMRist will have an argument against the truth of AT. (shrink)

By comparing Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) and Baudrillard through the lens of a study of the notion of withdrawal in Heidegger’s tool analysis and “The Question Concerning Technology”, this article explores the extent to which an Object-Oriented Baudrillard is possible, or even necessary. Considering an OOO understanding of Mauss’s gift-exchange, a possible critique of duomining in Baudrillard and a revision of Baudrillard’s understanding of art, the prospects of a new reading of Baudrillard and interpretation of OOO’s genealogy are established. These lines (...) of comparison qualify the role of withdrawal in Baudrillard and symbolic exchange for OOO, and lead towards the conclusion that an Object-Oriented Baudrillard is possible, but may not, conversely, be considered necessary. (shrink)

This Open Access book shows how value sensitive design (VSD), responsible innovation, and comprehensive engineering can guide the rapid development of technological responses to the COVID-19 crisis. Responding to the ethical challenges of data-driven technologies and other tools requires thinking about values in the context of a pandemic as well as in a post-COVID world. Instilling values must be prioritized from the beginning, not only in the emergency response to the pandemic, but in how to proceed with new societal precedents (...) materializing, new norms of health surveillance, and new public health requirements. -/- The contributors with expertise in VSD bridge the gap between ethical acceptability and social acceptance. By addressing ethical acceptability and societal acceptance together, VSD guides COVID-technologies in a way that strengthens their ability to fight the virus, and outlines pathways for the resolution of moral dilemmas. This volume provides diachronic reflections on the crisis response to address long-term moral consequences in light of the post-pandemic future. Both contact-tracing apps and immunity passports must work in a multi-system environment, and will be required to succeed alongside institutions, incentive structures, regulatory bodies, and current legislation. This text appeals to students, researchers and importantly, professionals in the field. (shrink)

Emily Paul has recently argued that Brian Leftow’s account of why the import of God’s becoming Incarnate is not temporal but modal fails. She argues that Leftow’s required modal variation is not satisfied. That is, we do not have the required variation across logical space concerning the Incarnation. Paul examines her argument on two possible worlds theories: theistic ersatzism and (what I call) Lewisian theism. She thinks that both possible worlds theories face difficulties. I argue that Paul fails to provide (...) a compelling argument against Leftow because, firstly, her defence of one her premises fails, and, secondly, she misjudges what is required for some of Leftow’s claims to be true. I also argue that some of the problematic consequences that Paul raises for theistic ersatzism and Lewisian theism either are not problematic or can be avoided. (shrink)

Much of everyday language is vague, even in situations where vagueness could have been avoided. Yet the benefits of vagueness for hearers and readers are proving to be elusive. We discuss a range of earlier controlled experiments with human participants, and we report on a new series of experiments that we ourselves have conducted in recent years. These experiments, which focus on vague expressions that are part of referential noun phrases, aim to separate the utility of vagueness from the utility (...) of other factors that tend to co-occur with vagueness. After presenting the evidence, we argue that it supports a view where the benefits that vague terms exert are due to other influences, and not to vagueness itself. (shrink)

A selection of poems from a chapbook research creation regarding the mystery of the printing and distribution of the Treaty 6 parchment. Treaty 6 was signed in 1876 with the promise of parchment copies to be delivered to the signatories the following year. This delivery did not occur. A copy of the parchment with unknown provenance is housed in Bruce Peel Special Collections at the University of Alberta. These poems are part of an ongoing research project examining the implications of (...) one-sided document access in a nation-to-nation agreement. (shrink)

A global health archive consisting of podoconiosis tissue slides and blocks, was donated to Brighton & Sussex Medical School in 2014. There is little guidance on the socioethical and legal issues surrounding the retrospective use of archived or ‘abandoned’ tissue samples, which poses a number of questions relating to the ethical standing of the archive. There is a great deal of interpretation in the guidelines that are currently in existence; however, modern ethical principles cannot be applied as it is not (...) feasible to either reconsent or retrospectively seek approval. Our research team believed that it was unethical to leave the archive in storage, as this option favours neither researcher nor subjects. Permission was obtained from the Human Tissue Authority and a local ethics board for the tissues to be utilized in on-going research on podoconiosis aetiology. There is a delicate balance between the benefits gained by society relating to the development and progress of scientific research and the risks to the donor regarding the reuse of their tissues. Clearer guidelines should be made available to ensure that researchers are able to reuse tissue archives in contemporary research. (shrink)

One can readily conceive of worlds of horrendous, gratuitous suffering. Moreover, such worlds seem possible. For classical theists, however, God, amongst other things, is perfectly good. So, the question arises: for classical theists are such evil worlds possible? Many classical theists have said no. This is the modal problem of evil. Herein, I discuss a related problem: the problem of evil worlds for Lewisian theism. Lewisian theism is the conjunction of Lewis’s modal realism and classical theism, and a leading Lewisian (...) theist, Almeida, thinks that Lewisian theists should admit the existence of on-balance evil worlds. I do not. Herein, I present a dilemma for Almeida: either give up God’s sovereignty and the reductionist account of modality or make God blameworthy for evil. (shrink)

According to classical theism, God is simple. However, contemporary objections to divine simplicity abound. One of those objections has received a lot of attention recently: the contingency objection. The objection is taken to pose a threat to God's freedom. Tomaszewski argues that the argument that supports the contingency objection, however, is invalid. Herein, I supply two valid versions of the argument; thus, the classical theist is required to defuse the argument.

Yates has recently argued that modal dispositionalism invalidates the axiom. Both Yates and Allen have advanced responses to the objection: Yates’s response proposes installing truth into the possibility biconditional, and Allen’s response requires that all properties be construed as being essentially dispositional. I argue that supporters of Borghini and Williams’s modal dispositionalist theory cannot accept these responses, given critical tenets of their theory. But, since these responses to the objection are the most plausible in the literature, I conclude that the (...) threat that Borghini and Williams’s modal dispositionalist theory invalidates the axiom still looms large. (shrink)

Sport Philosophy Now examines the current sports philosophy available and updates it in the “post-Lance Armstrong” age. While many sports philosophers have turned a blind eye to the reality of sport by focusing on ideologically-driven abstract ideals, this book offers an engaging alternative. Examining the field primarily through the competitive world of cycling, Matthew James McNees explores such issues as authenticity in sport, our tendency to create superficial high-minded meaning from the actions of athletes, and American capitalism in (...) sports. (shrink)

Social media technologies are routinely identified as a strong and pervasive threat to digital well-being. Extended screen time sessions, chronic distractions via notifications, and fragmented workflows have all been blamed on how these technologies ruthlessly undermine our ability to exercise quintessential human faculties. One reason SMTs can do this is because they powerfully affect our emotions. Nevertheless, how social media technology affects our emotional life and how these emotions relate to our digital well-being remain unexplored. Remedying this is important because (...) ethical insights into and open the possibility of designing for social media technologies in ways that actively reinforce our digital well-being. In this article, we examine the way social media technologies facilitate online emotions because of emotional affordances. This has important implications for evaluating the ethical implications of today’s social media platforms, as well as for how we design future ones. (shrink)

Postcolonial science studies entails ostensibly contradictory critical and empirical commitments. Science studies scholars influenced by Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers embrace forms of realist, radical empiricism, while postcolonial studies scholars influenced by Jacques Derrida trace the limits of the knowable. This essay takes their common use of the term cosmopolitics as an unexpected point of departure for reconciling Derrida’s program with Stengers’s and Latour’s. I read Derrida’s critique of hospitality and Stengers’s and Latour’s ontological politics as necessary complements for conceiving (...) a care-oriented subalternist cosmopolitics, a process of composing common worlds that remains attentive to the limits of representation. (shrink)

The reference of the postmodern task of thinking is Auschwitz, the abyss and discontinuity separating us from the world of our ancestors. As inhabitants of Planet Auschwitz our point of reference lacks all transcendental warrants; it is not a non-referable reference which constitutes the abyss we must enter, endure, and in which our intellectual and cultural tradition must be transformed. The private/public transformations which constitute the texts of this book attempt to depart from the dystopic individuality and public life resulting (...) from business-as-usual after Auschwitz. The three parts of the book are progressive reworkings of traditional metaphysics as adapted and modified by a modernism that refuses to grapple with its complicity. It is precisely that complicity which postmodern thinking takes up in its attempt to signify otherwise than the easy modernist translations and images of tradition. Thus it is a series of uneasy images imaging otherwise but never apart from modernity that take us away from complicity toward a transformed tradition. The uneasy images of this book are photogrammic combinations of photographs and texts, mutual supplements, pulling tradition through the Event against the persistent and murderous forces of contemporary idolatry and repression. (shrink)

In this book, leading Christian political thinkers and practitioners critique the Rawlsian concepts of “justice as fairness” and “public reason” from the perspective of Christian political theory and practice. It provides a new level of analysis from Christian perspectives, including implications for such hot topics as the culture war.

Control measures, such as “lockdowns”, have been widely used to suppress the COVID-19 pandemic. Under some conditions, they prevent illness and save lives. But they also exact an economic toll. How should we balance the impact of such policies on individual lives and livelihoods (and other dimensions of concern) to determine which is best? A widely used method of policy evaluation, benefit–cost analysis (BCA), answers these questions by converting all the effects of a policy into monetary equivalents and then summing (...) them up. A different method, social welfare analysis, proceeds by determining the effects of a policy on individual wellbeing and then applying an aggregation formula to them to evaluate the overall effects of a policy. In this chapter, we survey these methods and argue that social welfare analysis has important advantages. One crucial advantage is that it enables ethical considerations relating to the impact of policies on individual wellbeing and its distribution to be incorporated into policy assessments in a transparent way. We illustrate this with a simple numerical model for evaluating pandemic policies that vary in terms of the stringency of the controls that they impose on individual behaviour, showing how the evaluation depends on the ethical significance accorded to their impact on the wellbeing of different age and income groups. (shrink)

Matthew Arnold was born at Laleham-on-Thames on 24 December 1822 as the eldest son of Dr Thomas Arnold and his wife Mary. He was educated at Winchester College, his father's old school; Rugby, where his father was headmaster; and Oxford. In 1851 he was appointed Inspector of Schools, pursuing this taxing career to support his wife and family until his retirement in 1886. He published his first volume of verse, The Strayed Reveller, and other Poems, in 1849 followed by (...) Empedocles on Etna, and other Poems (1852) and five further collections which appeared, with a diminishing number of new poems in each, between 1853 and 1867, after which his creative gift appeared to dwindle still further and he published little poetry. His career as a writer of prose began to take over after his election to the Professorship of Poetry at Oxford in 1857. Stimulated by preparing his lectures, many of the earliest published in 1865 as Essays in Criticism (First Series), he turned increasingly to the vigorous and widely ranging polemical commentaries on culture, religion, and society which were to make him known at home and abroad as the foremost critic of his day. He died suddenly of heart failure on 15 April 1888 while awaiting at Liverpool the arrival of his married daughter from America. (shrink)

The results of four experiments provide evidence for controlled processing in the absence of awareness. Participants identified the colour of a neutral distracter word. Each of four words was presented in one of the four colours 75% of the time or 50% of the time . Colour identification was faster when the words appeared in the colour they were most often presented in relative to when they appeared in another colour, even for participants who were subjectively unaware of any contingencies (...) between the words and the colours. An analysis of sequence effects showed that participants who were unaware of the relation between distracter words and colours nonetheless controlled the impact of the word on performance depending on the nature of the previous trial. A block analysis of contingency-unaware participants revealed that contingencies were learned rapidly in the first block of trials. Experiment 3 showed that the contingency effect does not depend on the level of awareness, thus ruling out explicit strategy accounts. Finally, Experiment 4 showed that the contingency effect results from behavioural control and not from semantic association or stimulus familiarity. These results thus provide evidence for implicit control. (shrink)

Patients and physicians often perceive the current health care system to be unfair, in part because of the ways in which coverage decisions appear to be made. To address this problem the Ethical Force Program, a collaborative effort to create quality improvement tools for ethics in health care, has developed five content areas specifying ethical criteria for fair health care benefits design and administration. Each content area includes concrete recommendations and measurable expectations for performance improvement, which can be used by (...) those organizations involved in the design and administration of health benefits packages, such as purchasers, health plans, benefits consultants, and practitioner groups. (shrink)

The COVID-19 crisis has forced a difficult trade-off between limiting the health impacts of the virus and maintaining economic activity. Welfare economics offers tools to conceptualize this trade-off so that policy-makers and the public can see clearly what is at stake. We review four such tools: the Value of Statistical Life (VSL); the Value of Statistical Life Years (VSLYs); Quality-Adjusted Life-Years (QALYs); and social welfare analysis, and argue that the latter are superior. We also discuss how to choose policies that (...) differentially affect people’s wellbeing. We argue in favor of evaluating policies using a Social Welfare Function (SWF), which evaluates the possible distributions of wellbeing across individuals that may result from a policy. Such a function, we argue, should regard increases in the wellbeing of the less well-off as especially valuable. We then use a model to illustrate how such a framework can help evaluate two broad policy types in response to the pandemic: eradication of the virus, and more lenient control of the spread. Our model reveals how such evaluations depend on many empirical facts but also on key value judgments about the relative importance of health and on the extent of special concern for the worse off. The purpose of this brief is not to make precise recommendations, as conditions vary widely across countries and over time, but to provide a methodology. (shrink)

Since the work of Gödel and Cohen, which showed that Hilbert's First Problem was independent of the usual assumptions of mathematics, there have been a myriad of independence results in many areas of mathematics. These results have led to the systematic study of several combinatorial principles that have proven effective at settling many of the important independent statements. Among the most prominent of these are the principles diamond and square discovered by Jensen. Simultaneously, attempts have been made to find suitable (...) natural strengthenings of ZFC, primarily by Large Cardinal or Reflection Axioms. These two directions have tension between them in that Jensen's principles, which tend to suggest a rather rigid mathematical universe, are at odds with reflection properties. A third development was the discovery by Shelah of "PCF Theory", a generalization of cardinal arithmetic that is largely determined inside ZFC. In this paper we consider interactions between these three theories in the context of singular cardinals, focusing on the various implications between square and scales, and on consistency results between relatively strong forms of square and stationary set reflection. (shrink)

Patients and physicians often perceive the current health care system to be unfair, in part because of the ways in which coverage decisions appear to be made. To address this problem the Ethical Force Program, a collaborative effort to create quality improvement tools for ethics in health care, has developed five content areas specifying ethical criteria for fair health care benefits design and administration. Each content area includes concrete recommendations and measurable expectations for performance improvement, which can be used by (...) those organizations involved in the design and administration of health benefits packages, such as purchasers, health plans, benefits consultants, and practitioner groups. (shrink)

This essay traces the ontological and political limits of Bruno Latour’s conceptualization of the ‘common world’. Latour formulates this concept in explicating how modernist scientific and political institutions require a metaphysical foundation that is anti-democratic in rigidly partitioning nature from society. In the stead of nature/society, Latour proposes a ‘cosmopolitics’ in which we recognize our embroilment in systems comprised of heterogeneous human and nonhuman actors, and seek to innovate appropriate procedures for governing such systems and composing a more peaceful common (...) world. However, feminist and postcolonialist science studies scholars have argued that Latour’s project fails to apprehend the experiences of subjects marginalized by scientific and political structures of representation. Thus, science studies scholars seem to be faced with a problem; to avoid ontological dissonance and contradiction in integrating Latour’s program with feminist and postcolonialist critiques we must defer his claims that the cosmopolitical program entirely supersedes contemporary social movements and oppositional politics. I offer an alternative. Namely, I argue that Latour’s formulations of cosmopolitics’ procedures and the common world’s boundaries actually require an incipient model of the limits of democratic representation. I modify Latour’s proposed system of representation by reading it against Dipesh Chakrabarty’s concept of ‘subaltern pasts’, which are unassimilable to academic historical narratives (in their attribution of agency to nonhuman gods, for example). This reading emphasizes how Latour does not adequately theorize and politicize the partially autonomous reality of those excluded from the common world and thus fails to attend to how this externalization replicates the violence of modernist representational institutions. (shrink)

Since the work of Gödel and Cohen, which showed that Hilbert's First Problem was independent of the usual assumptions of mathematics, there have been a myriad of independence results in many areas of mathematics. These results have led to the systematic study of several combinatorial principles that have proven effective at settling many of the important independent statements. Among the most prominent of these are the principles diamond and square discovered by Jensen. Simultaneously, attempts have been made to find suitable (...) natural strengthenings of ZFC, primarily by Large Cardinal or Reflection Axioms. These two directions have tension between them in that Jensen's principles, which tend to suggest a rather rigid mathematical universe, are at odds with reflection properties. A third development was the discovery by Shelah of "PCF Theory", a generalization of cardinal arithmetic that is largely determined inside ZFC. In this paper we consider interactions between these three theories in the context of singular cardinals, focusing on the various implications between square and scales, and on consistency results between relatively strong forms of square and stationary set reflection. (shrink)

Emerging adult newlywed couples often experience many demands on their time, and three common problems may surface as couples try to balance these demands—problems related to finances, sleep, and sex. We used two waves of dyadic data from 1,001 emerging adult newlywed couples to identify four dyadic latent profiles from husbands’ and wives’ financial management behaviors, sexual satisfaction, and sleep quality: Flounderers, Financially Challenged Lovers, Drowsy Budgeters, and Flourishers. We then examined how husbands’ and wives’ marital satisfaction, in relation to (...) profile membership, varied at a later wave. We found that Financially Challenged Lovers and Flourishers had significantly higher marital satisfaction than Drowsy Budgeters and Flounderers. Whereas, Financially Challenged Lovers and Flourishers did not differ in terms of marital satisfaction, Drowsy Budgeters seemed to have slightly higher marital satisfaction than Flounderers for wives only. However, we did not find evidence that these connections meaningfully differed by sex. Implications for the efforts of clinicians and educators are discussed. (shrink)

Design based research has been acknowledged as a productive approach for advancing educational technology. Coincidentally, open source software has been found to be a good fit for implementing design based research. This report presents a case study of a software project using a design-based research approach and free/open source software. The project, iSocial, is developing a 3D virtual environment for youth with autism spectrum disorders to develop social competence. The study illustrates how the flexibility and community features of FOSS fit (...) with the iterative nature of design-based research to benefit the development of iSocial, and the report also discusses challenges of implementing FOSS and DBR. (shrink)

This Dictionary provides a wide range of coverage on a topic that has played a significant role in human society, from the early theoreticians and thinkers who proposed republican, democratic, and authoritarian innovations; to those who sought equality of classes, races, and genders; to those who insisted on hierarchy under a supreme leader, or god; and to those who had more practical economic, social, and ethical plans. This historical dictionary covers the most vital information on the persons, plans, and attempts (...) associated with utopianism that have been seen since ancient times. An introductory essay, chronology, 600 dictionary entries, an extensive bibliography, and an appendix listing the names and locations of utopian communities worldwide enable the reader to explore the Western mind's desire to improve the world and the lives of the people within it as utopianism has persisted over the centuries. (shrink)

In AFTERLIVES OF AFFECT, Watson considers the life and work of Mayanist Linda Schele (1942 - 1988) as an entry point to discuss the nature of cultural inquiry and the metaphor of decipherment in anthropology. Watson figures Schele as a trickster guide in his experimental, person-centered ethnography, reanimating the work of decipherment and drawing upon an "affect of discovery" that better expresses the affective engagement of anthropologists and their subject of study. Through her archive, Watson finds an (...) archaeologist wholly animated by her fieldsite and immersed in a more "spiritual science," though nonetheless still imbricated in a system of settler-colonial knowledge production. By holding Schele's work in conversation with both her own interlocutors and prominent voices in the field today, Watson refocuses on anthropologists who are engaged as individuals; carrying their own attachments with them as they describe, interpret, and decipher what they observe, and in doing so, positions affective engagement as a constitutive element in a more reflexive anthropology. The book is organized into six chapters that progress thematically through Schele's life and Watson's autoethnographic reflections on his own research. In Sacrilege (chapter 1), Watson draws together moments throughout his research where he felt his exhumation of Schele's work veered too closely to disturbing what was laid to rest-much like Schele's own work, which relied on the unearthing of sites long laid to rest, reanimating long-dead Mayan rulers and artists. The chapter sets the tone of the work as always toeing the line and risking the introduction of the mystical and affective into scientific interpretation-edgewalking with Schele. In Animals (chapter 2), Watson draws upon metaphors in the animal world, as did Schele when she sought inspiration for her next moment of insight; spider webs present a Geertzian metaphor for webs of signification, while rabbits are trickster guides, a transtemporalizing technology, drawing Schele (and Watson) forward and back through time. Through these reflections, Watson builds iteratively on arguments throughout the book that return to themes more recognizable in contemporary theory conversations: more-than-human worlds, the question of modernity, and the social conditions of knowledge production. This book will be of interest to readers in anthropology, especially those engaged in the ontological turn and more-than-human worlds, as well as the history of anthropology and anthropology theory more broadly. This book will also be of interest to readers in science studies, the posthumanities, and affect theory. (shrink)

This article argues that the turn to the animal is a return to mythology. By reading multispecies scholarship as narrativization of contemporary mythology, I claim that the field voices anxieties about human futures through figures of animal others. Multispecies ethnography implicitly grapples with an apocalyptic mythos prevailing in the wake of modernity’s seemingly abandoned dreams. I reconsider the cultural function of multispecies research through two moves. First, I read Thom van Dooren’s Theory, Culture & Society article on ‘Authentic Crows’ as (...) such a quasi-allegorical account. Second, I develop how animal anthropology captures the contemporary mythos in an ‘affirmationist’ register that counters the pessimistic affect of late industrialism. Ultimately, the critical politics of such research may be redeemed through efforts to work closely with scientists and to render explicit the accounts’ situatedness within late-industrial mythology. (shrink)

Many groups of closely related species have reticulate phylogenies. Recent genomic analyses are showing this in many insects and vertebrates, as well as in microbes and plants. In microbes, lateral gene transfer is the dominant process that spoils strictly tree‐like phylogenies, but in multicellular eukaryotes hybridization and introgression among related species is probably more important. Because many species, including the ancestors of ancient major lineages, seem to evolve rapidly in adaptive radiations, some sexual compatibility may exist among them. Introgression and (...) reticulation can thereby affect all parts of the tree of life, not just the recent species at the tips. Our understanding of adaptive evolution, speciation, phylogenetics, and comparative biology must adapt to these mostly recent findings. Introgression has important practical implications as well, not least for the management of genetically modified organisms in pest and disease control. (shrink)